Tab chars are a 'gotcha' in Update editor w/ accuterm

The Update editor is one application that really stresses
your communications software's abilities; essentially U
is unworkable if you're in the sad situation of using the
telnet command of microsoft windows to connect with
your D3 server, because what you see is __not__ what
you'll get, and you end up typing in changes to a different
line of text than you intended, all unknowingly.

So Telnet from microsoft is out. I personally prefer using
Accuterm, especially one of the later flavors like 2K2
that handles the ssh protocol. It does me very well when
I'm connected to a d3 server where I have the freedom
to use TERM settings that emulate the redhat linux
console screens, or vt100 serial terminals, or similar.
The one thing it falls down on for my needs is reading
the linux man pages, in that they have a few characters
of uniquely Unicode content {esp. quote marks -- they
love to use the left-versus-right-slanting quote marks).
Accuterm thus far does not seem to support Unicode, though
it nicely puts up some garbage characters onscreen to show
me there's __something__ there that I'm missing. But by
and large, this commercial product has been very very good
to me. I can always fire up the freebie product Putty if I
really give a hoot about seeing the Man pages in precise detail,
or view the man pages in a web browser from some generic
linux documentation web site.

But the other day I suddenly had a program look all wonky in
Update, and found that it had Tab characters in place. It was
just as bad in Accuterm 2K2 as any old program is using the
Microsoft telnet client. Turns out this program came from
a customer that had made edits using Wordpad, and I had
blithely run it through the linux program dos2unix
{other flavors of linux may call it dtox }. Turns out you have
to use the expand program of linux to convert tabs to spaces,
dos2unix only nukes the extra trailing carriage returns {and maybe
the end-of-file mark {control-d} that may be found sometimes
at the very end of a dos file.} Also, you might want to use tr
to nuke formfeed characters, or to convert the escape character
to something visible like % or ` when you get a file from abroad...

Unlike unicode characters, accuterm didn't have any odd text on the
screen due to these tabs, so it took me a while to track down what
was wrong; I only knew that searching in U to a specific text
string didn't leave my cursor on that string, but instead one or more
lines down the screen.


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